Suicidal Tendencies and Ideation prediction using Reddit

4. Testing our Model

Seven months after her passing, Victoria's mother discovered a digital diary that Victoria had been keeping in her laptop. That diary contained detailed entries about her life and her thought process about suicide. They were written in the four months prior to April 14th, 2014. That morning, at 4am, she would would fall 10 floors to her death.

The Dataset

Victoria's family made the contents of her diary available to Jesse Bering, a research psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. We scraped exerpts of the diary from Bering's published findings in his book Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves.

Applying our model to Victoria's writings allows us to see if our model -- trained on data from online communities -- would generalise well to an unseen test set. In this case, an individual's words.

Using social psychologist Roy Baumeister's theory, Bering mapped different parts of Victoria's diary to six different progressive stages from "falling short of expectations"(stage one) to "high self-awareness"(stage three) to the final stage of "disinhibition". We've matched Bering's findings to each diary exerpt in our dataset.

Conclusion: